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In our company we understand that testing up-front can be off-putting, but we rather pass up a great candidate than hiring a poor one (we do subscribe to Polsky view on candidates http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...). We allow them to test at their pace (codility.com) from home first, then we re-test them on-site (to avoid the 'someone doing my homework' effect). After that the next interview is pretty much talking on the code written code and approaches or decisions that the candidate took. So in that sense is a great piece to further discussion. The issue is that where I work we can't subcontract as a way to 'test' for candidates. The code is so proprietary, and have so much red tape (Options Trading platform) that we don't trust anyone unless you are full-time. Also, the code is fairly complex and embedded in it's industry-speak that unless you come from the same industry subset, you will not be productive (like knowing what Black-scholes, instrument, or delta means). So the investment to getting any good developer to be able to produce is immense. We considered subcontracting for assessing a candidate, but it is fairly hard. Also we have seen people that do extremely well on every other aspect of the interview but can't deliver when asked to write a piece of code. Good or bad it does show your ability to work under pressure (I am not sure if it's extreme in the financial industry, but stress levels here run fairly high... for a fun read http://codesnipers.com/?q=interview-the-wall-street-programm...). So when you're getting your coffee, someone comes and says 'we need to fix this' it will probably be as intimidating (or more) as having a code interview. Lastly, maybe because we've seen it often enough, there are a ton of programmers that can't write code (yes, the fizzbuzz crew). Having the codility test filter in front of all eliminates a lot of that chaff we see, so we don't even bother with the candidates unless they get a good-enough result in codility (we do look at the code, not just if it passes/fails the unit tests, but we don't bring the candidate for an actual interview until we have a reasonable expectation that they can program). We understand we will miss Ike Ellis, and we accept that as part of the tradeoffs between time and opportunities. |